Michael Kulikowski

Anglophone​ ancient historians have never had much time for Marx. They tie themselves in knots to avoid class-based analyses, recasting what can look an awful lot like class in terms of something else (status, say, or ‘social stratification’); or they dismiss class as an analytical category on the grounds, refuted long ago by Fredric Jameson, that it’s inapplicable in a...

Hellenistic history is exceedingly hard to write, a kaleidoscope of great kings and petty warlords, huge armies fighting pointless wars. The period is badly documented, too often dependent on a stultifying first-century BC cut-and-paste job by Diodorus the Sicilian. Knowledge advances incrementally: a new reading here, an unpublished coin there, scattered archaeological finds here, there and...

We know much less than we would like about the Syrian queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and rather less than our 19th-century predecessors, who wrote before source-criticism eliminated much of the supposed evidence for her life. For a short time in the 260s and 270s AD, Zenobia ruled most of the Roman near east without reference to anyone’s authority but her own. In defeat and forced...

To cheat one’s enemy of victory can be a victory in itself, at least when any hope of actually winning a war has disappeared. So it was with one of Rome’s most flamboyant enemies, Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus. He had cheated death for decades, at the hands of family, of ostensible friends, of many a declared enemy. Time and again he had checkmated Rome’s most...

Dates have a funny way of imposing a preconceived analysis on the past. They can function by synecdoche: 1776 for the five years of the American Revolution, 1976 for the punk revolution and its aftermath. Or they can work by metonymy: 1789 stands for the dawn of modernity itself. When a book takes that sort of date for a title, it’s rarely more than a gimmick to spice up a familiar...